


Renewal

by DreamingPagan



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Happy Ending, M/M, Miranda Barlow Appreciation, Miranda Hamilton Appreciation, Miranda Lives AU, and also showcases her hatred of winter, but her men think she's dead, misunderstandings are had, wherein Miranda is alive, wherein the author plays with Homeric themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-26 20:09:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13865118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamingPagan/pseuds/DreamingPagan
Summary: Thomas thinks he might be mad the day he starts seeing Miranda's ghost.When she sees Thomas standing not ten feet away from her, Miranda wonders the same.





	Renewal

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally supposed to be Christmas fic, but I'm actually very pleased that it turned out not to be.

The first time Thomas sees her, he stares for the space of a minute and then, slowly, he closes his eyes. He squeezes them shut, and counts - one breath, two breaths, in and out and in again and leaves them closed, because if he opens them, it will become that much more obvious that he is hallucinating, and  _ he does not want to know.  _

It is Miranda. It must be - she stands in the cold early December wind, hair blowing about her face, a small frown directed his way, and her eyes -

The wind blows, and in the odd bluish light of early evening, she could be as solid as he - or as spectral as any ghost. Even with his eyes closed, standing here - he knows which it is, which it must be.

The day is cold, and it bites at his cheeks. There is snow on the ground - his fingers tingle with the cold even through his thick gloves, and it must be this - it must be the climate, he thinks, that is causing him to see his late wife in the marketplace, here, now. It is the temperature - nothing more - the season, playing tricks as it always does, and of all the bloody gods-cursed times for his father to have taken him from his home, it had had to be four days before Christmas. 

He stands, and breathes, and reminds himself of what is real, hands shaking, breath coming short in his throat. 

She is not there.

She is not there - not at all. It is the wind, and the time of year, and the lingering ache of his scars that is stealing his breath and his reason, and when he looks back up -

She is gone. He opens his eyes, and Miranda’s shade has gone, and he is not certain if he is relieved or devastated or a bit of each. 

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath, and feels tears start at the corners of his eyes. “Bloody  _ fucking  _ Christ -”

This particular torment, he fears, will never be over. He will never be free of it - and how, how in the hell is he to cope if every time the temperature drops, he starts to see - to see - 

He slaps himself, and the blow scarcely feels like anything in the face of the wind that has been biting at him all day long, chilling him to the very bone.

“Get hold of yourself,” he hisses, furious. “She cannot be there. You  _ know  _ that, you know better. Stop it.” 

He closes his eyes again, and then reopens them, and clenches his teeth. No. He saw nothing. There was nothing, and he refuses to even for a single second allow himself to think otherwise. He has not survived ten years a prisoner and then a slave only to finally become what all of England would have him be - what his father had so kindly told everyone he was. He will not be that man. Thus determined, he looks around him. The market is closing down - vendors packing up their wares, pulling their winter things tighter around themselves as they do so, and it is quite obviously time for Thomas himself to be going home.

She is gone, and the day is winding down, the sun setting over the hills, and the night will only get colder. James will be waiting - and by the time he has walked the mile and a half back to their townhouse, perhaps, just perhaps, he will no longer feel as though his mind is playing tricks on him.

Perhaps he will forget what he has seen, and be able to tell himself for a while longer that he is still sane and unbroken by his trials. Perhaps.

Winter cannot be over fast enough.

*********************************************************

“Thomas?” The question comes from James a week later. They are at the market again - the same place, but the weather has cleared, the day is sunny, and there is no sign - none whatsoever - of anything odd. No wind, no snow - no ghosts. “Is everything alright?” James asks, and Thomas turns.

“Perfectly,” he answers, smile firmly in place. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it? Perhaps later we can go and see if we can’t find someone selling chestnuts - I haven’t had any in more years than I care to count. I’d imagine there were none in the West Indies, either - speaking of which, what  _ do  _ they do for winter traditions in such a climate?”

James gives him an odd look - one of the sort he occasionally favors Thomas with, one that says that his husband has managed to ask him a question the answer to which he has not previously thought on. Or, in Thomas’ experience, a look that means that the strangeness of that answer has only now penetrated James’ consciousness, and he braces himself.

“Do you know, I don’t recall ever asking,” James answers slowly, thoughtfully. “I usually made certain we were in port that week and was tasked by Mr. Gates to see to it that we took a fat merchantman carrying chocolate and woollens not long before - I suppose that’s your answer, really. We didn’t - celebrate, as such, not with you gone. I don’t think we could have borne it, if I’m to be quite honest.”

His voice goes quiet at that last - his gaze drops, his hands clench - and then he looks up, looks at Thomas, and seems to catch his breath. 

“This will be the first Christmas without her,” he says softly. “Damn it. I didn’t even think about it before and now -”

The sound of self-recrimination in his voice is all too clear, and Thomas cannot help himself - he reaches out, places a hand on James’ arm, gripping gently. 

“And now I’ve gone poking about and brought it up,” Thomas says just as softly. “James - look, let’s talk about this when we get home, alright? It’s no good doing it here, it’ll have us both crying- if I had half a brain in my skull I’d never have made you think on it. Of course you didn’t celebrate bloody Christmas, how could you?”

James closes his eyes. 

“We couldn’t,” he answered. “And now, when I  _ can _ \- when you’re  _ here, alive  _ -” He stops, and bows his head for a moment, and then, eyes still closed, head still bowed, he starts to speak again. “She loved you,” he says roughly. “I see us here, now, and I can’t help but imagine what she would have made of it all - whether she’d have been proud or pleased or -” He shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” he says after a moment. “I don’t know, some days, what she would have thought, and sometimes I can’t help but wonder if -” He stops again. “I know what Charlestown  _ looks  _ like. I know what’s been said happened there, but I want you to understand that it wasn’t that. I had my revenge for what was done that day for the next several months, waded in blood until I’d had my fill. I may have played Achilles in that moment but Miranda began that siege. Charlestown began with her. She wanted - before she died, she knew what Peter Ashe had done. She found out and -” He looks up. “God, Thomas - the look in her eyes. If I thought I had seen her angry before, I hadn’t, and I don’t know how to describe it. She looked - ” 

Thomas tries to swallow past a lump in his throat.

“As though someone had angered Pallas Athene so greatly as to bring her to Earth.” James shoots him a startled look, and he smiles weakly. “She was fierce,” he all but whispers. “She was always that.” 

James nods, and Thomas wraps an arm around his shoulders in the best embrace he can manage here in the open marketplace.

“Let’s go home,” he says. “We can talk about her properly - she deserves that at least.” 

They drink that night, and talk about Miranda into the wee small hours, and when James begins to tell him of the dreams he had had of her in the months after her death, Thomas listens, and does not mention seeing her himself, for the woman he had seen had been different - so very different to the one James describes, and yet -

Had James ever mentioned, before, exactly where she had been shot? Thomas tries to recall, and wonders if imagination or buried memory are to blame for the fact that he had seen the mark of a gunshot wound on Miranda’s forehead in exactly the place James describes.

Can one truly kill a goddess?

******************************************************************************

Christmas passes, and he and James celebrate as best they may. It is as happy as they can make it - Thomas refuses to allow his first Christmas as a free man to be anything but, and James throws himself into making it so, seemingly determined to atone for past mistakes. There is mirth, and good cheer, and if Thomas awakes the following morning with both a headache and a pleasant soreness between his thighs - well, James tries not to be too smug and mostly succeeds. They light a candle in Miranda’s memory, and they sing one of her favorite carols, and Thomas might think that the end of it. He might genuinely believe himself cured - Miranda’s shade put to rest, now that they have spoken of her, begun to remember her with joy as well as pain, instead of shying away from the topic. His days go on undisturbed for a time. The sun shines in its pale, wintry way, there is no snow, much to Thomas mixed relief and disappointment - 

And then, as winter begins to turn to spring - as ice gives way to mud and Thomas begins to feel himself excited for the first time in years to feel the air start to grow warmer - he sees her again, and this time he cannot help the cry of surprise that leaves his mouth at the sight, for she is standing just in front of a church, in broad daylight. There is no snow - nothing to obscure her from view, and this time -

When she turns toward him, he cannot help the small whimper of longing and of pain that leaves his mouth. He does not understand why she torments him so - and he does not understand when the ghost’s eyes widen. He understands still less when she turns on her heel - and runs away from him, away from the church she was just about, from all appearances, to enter, and can apparitions enter churches? Can apparitions stand on a street on a less than chilly day in early spring, wearing a dress he does not recall Miranda possessing? Can - 

Christ, can it truly be his wife standing there across the street? He does not have the time to wonder - does not have the time to think, for in a moment he is running after her, because he cannot - no, will not allow Miranda to fear him. Not now, not in the next life, not in any version of reality, not his Miranda. 

He cannot lose her, not again, and if she should drag him into war and fire, so be it. They have been apart so long - it seems an age, and if he should prove to be following no more than an apparition, no more than a goddess like to turn him into a stag for his pursuit -

Well. James will be less than pleased, he is certain, but if ever anyone were equipped to strike a bargain with another minor deity to turn him back, it is James. He won’t mind - of all men, he will understand why Thomas cannot alter his course.

**********************************************************************************

She does not recall leaving Charlestown.

She is told, later - much later, by the young woman tending her - that she was found fleeing toward the harbor. She is further informed by a doctor that she seems to have been shot in the head, and the man looks at her with a mixture of amazement and suspicion as he says it, narrowed eyes examining her face as she reacts - 

As if, she thinks, she is as damaged as she knows she should be. 

“The city was falling around me,” she demurs. “A great many men did a great many things in order to escape.” She knows it to be true. She has read the accounts of the fall of Troy, of Constantinople - these she can recall, but not how she came to be here, and in the absence of true memory, she is willing to allow the doctor to assume what he will. She has a notion that it is safer, that way - she does not recall how she came to be shot, but she knows that she has been, and she knows that Captain Flint is said to have burned the city entire. 

There is a bullet in her brain, and on some days she feels as though she can sense it. Her thoughts are foggy, still - her emotions dull, and perhaps that is why she does not scream when she realizes that James - her James - does not know she is alive. Still - she can feel her heart race at the realization - can feel her hands go clammy and cold, feels her breath stutter in her chest. He is alone. Someone - someone who is most likely now dead - has done this to her, and James must think her gone, and it is intolerable. His is utterly alone, and it cannot remain so - she has promised Thomas, and she will not break that vow. She cannot allow it. She must not- and for the first few months she tries, oh, how she tries to bring his suffering to an end. 

She has not the coin to leave Philadelphia, once she arrives, and despite the calluses on her hands, despite every argument she makes, every threat, every plea - no ship in the harbor will take her on as crew or passenger. Winter is coming, she hears - the ships are getting ready to moor to wait out the snows and ice, the crews settling in to drink away their hard-earned pay, and the ships that  _ are  _ leaving are heading not south but east - back to England, back to more cold and wet and miserable, grey skies. No cart driver, either - nor would she chance it, not alone, not over the vast swathes of unpeopled territory that stand between her and yet another port, no doubt, where none will take her on. The seasons are shifting, and there is no way out of this city - not with her shaking hands, and her at times uncertain steps, not with her voice which proclaims her origins no matter how she attempts to hide it, and so she writes a letter.  _ My own darling, _ she writes, “I am alive, I am  _ here _ -” She writes, with fingers that do not seem to be able to avoid ink stains any longer, her letters wobbling in a way they had never used. She writes, and she curses, and she balls the letter up and hurls it into the fireplace, knowing that what she has written looks nothing like her own hand and that James will never believe the words she writes coming from another. She is angry, still - so angry, still burning with Charlestown, and this city, this stolid, boring place keeps her here as surely as a shackle would have done. She burns, and when she has burned away all of her fury, when she can no longer keep herself warm through rage alone, she weeps with it - with the helpless frustration of it all. She has no more funds for ink or paper - she has no more funds for anything, and the roof over her head remains her only blessing, shared as it is with the family whose child she is now tutoring. She fishes the letter from the grate, where it stood no chance of catching fire to begin with, since she is now all but out of wood and the last embers linger, soon to be extinguished. On the reverse side, she begins to write again, and falls asleep at her small desk, head down on the page.

When she wakes, the anger lies banked within her, there but dormant, and she knows - she must find a way out of this place. She must find her way back to James, and to his war - to what should be  _ their war,  _ hers and her Odysseus _ ,  _ before the coals that still sit in her heart go out entirely _.  _ She straightens her spine, and begins to keep an eye on the papers - begins to track. If she cannot leave yet, then she will keep herself apprised of new developments. She will know where he is, and what he has done, and when she joins him, it will be as a partner - a true partner, this time. 

Her handwriting improves slightly over the months. She practices - again, and again, and again when she has the coin to spare, the same words, until at last they look as though she, Miranda, might have written them. She stares down at her letter, hand shaking, pride in her accomplishment filling her, and she thinks - her freedom and James are so close. She has done it, finally - she will send her letter in the morning.

In her dreams, she sees fire and rubble and hears screams, and she wakes with a shout on her lips to a cold, dark room in a strange city and weeps. She is not surprised when days later she hears that Captain Flint has gone missing.

The news feels unreal - and yet too real at the same time, and she wonders if in some part of her she has expected it. She hates the thought, and herself for having it. This was not inevitable - nothing about it was in any way inevitable, and she grieves, and she wonders why it is that she is grieving, who it is that she must hurt - 

Whether it is James himself who has done this thing, and she hates that thought as well. James has always felt everything with his entire heart. His grief for her has been no different, and she knows - she  _ suspects,  _ perhaps, or simply wonders if it has taken him from her, just as Thomas’ righteous fire had taken him away, and she hates the notion, wants to rip and tear and scream and yet - 

She is not herself. It is still too soon - too soon after the head injury, too soon after Charlestown, too horrible, too heavy - 

It is too much. She spends the next month in a haze - all progress disrupted, wiped away, fully as little aware of the world as she had been upon coming to this city. There is nothing - nothing at all, and no one, and if there is nothing and no one then she cannot hurt, cannot ache, cannot feel as if the world had torn in two with the pain of it. She cannot feel it, or - or - 

Thomas’ ghost stares at her in the marketplace, and she can feel her heart stutter. 

The snow swirls, and the blue haze in the air from cookfire smoke envelops her, and there, standing in the midst of it all, is her husband. He is dressed in blue - warm clothing for winter, with a fur-lined cloak wrapped around him, and just for a moment, just for one instant, she allows herself to believe. 

“Thomas?” she whispers. There are embers in her words - glowing coals being blown slowly, carefully back to life - 

She sees the moment that his lids close as clearly as she sees daylight, and the coals are extinguished with the light in his blue eyes. She sees the moment that he bows his head, and feels her heart stop utterly in her chest. She is short of breath - she cannot breath, cannot bear his silent judgment - 

This is not her husband, it cannot be. Her loving, noble husband would never - could never - judge her so harshly for following his commands, he could not - 

His shade remains, eyes still closed, head still bowed, and she hears a strange noise, almost a whimper, escape her. Someone has taken hold of her heart and squeezed it with the intent to see her dead, they must have done so, for nothing else could possibly hurt this way. Nothing - save the look in her husband’s eyes, and from nothing there is now everything, every emotion she has been too frightened to feel, all at once, turning her blood to ice, and then permafrost. She is crying - tears stream down her cheeks, biting in the cold winter air, and she stands, and feels them, and stares, because - 

She has failed him. She has failed them both. She sits, heedless of the crowd, and weeps, and is ignored, and by the time the snow flurry ends, she is covered utterly in flakes. They seep into her clothing - chill her to the bone, and she wonders - if she becomes cold enough, can she follow them? Can she follow her men, apologize, say to them all the things she has wanted to say, these many years? Can she do that? Can she find them and atone for being such a fickle, changeable thing, so fiery and so cold by equal measure?

There are two figures approaching her. She ignores them, tries to stay, sitting, in the snow, unnoticed, but they are pointing. They have seen her. She bows her head, and waits.

“My God,” the hushed voice comes from her right. “Mistress Barlow - she’s cold as ice, Robert, fetch a blanket-”

Is she as mad now as they said Thomas was? The woman she knows only as Martha Wells certainly seems to fear it so. She does not touch Miranda - seems to fear her - 

She looks up, into the eyes of her employer, and she must be pathetic indeed, for fear softens to concern and a sort of weary sympathy.

“Miranda,” she says softly, and sits down. “Thank God we’ve found you. Come - come away. Robert will fetch the sleigh - come along, and tell me what ails you over a cup of hot chocolate.”

She has not had chocolate - not in so very long. The thought of it does not dull her misery - the last time was with Thomas, but the kindness of the gesture is not lost on her. She attempts a smile - not, she feels, very successfully, but it seems to reassure Mrs. Wells nonetheless.

“I fear it is a long tale,” she says, and allows herself to be drawn upward and helped to the sleigh. 

“A long tale means a long time by the fire, ma’am,” Robert, her fellow servant in the household, rumbles. “Let me give you hand.” 

She is handed up and into the sleigh, and for the barest of instants -

She squeezes her eyes shut, and imagines that it is James’ callused hand rather than Robert’s and she begins to weep. She does not stop, not for some time.

Weeks pass.  The nights grow colder, the days darker. The city streets begin to be a slush composed of mud and ice. Her small garret room grows colder, and she perhaps it is the cold weather that brings her back to herself in some sense. It has been so long since she felt the cold - and with the last shivers of winter, she feels herself begin to regain her equilibrium. Perhaps, she thinks, she has now become one with the earth - coming back to life with it. She begins to move about again - begins to be able to think again - and on the first day when the ground is again tolerably dry, she ventures forth from the house. 

The day is warm - warmer than she had expected. Horses go by in the street. A breeze wafts in her direction.

Thomas would have loved this day, she thinks wistfully. James would have enjoyed it as well, and why has she seen only Thomas’s face, these past months? Why only he, when he has been absent these many years?

It is strange, she muses as she walks - Thomas’ shade has not followed her to her lodgings, and she cannot decide if she is grateful or angered at that simple fact. She has been alone - save, that is, for her charge, mercifully at home today. There has been no trace of Thomas - is her mind, then, so fickle as to only conjure him outside of her own home? Is his ghost so distracted even now with other matters? Surely, if he is angry with her outside, he can be angry enough to follow her?  _ Angry enough _ , she thinks in the lonely dead of night,  _ to stay _ . Just one more glimpse - one more sight of his face -

The anger sparks in her again, and she could not say why, but the light of the morning sun against the remaining ice glints, and she turns -

Thomas is standing across the street, scarcely two yards distant, and Miranda cannot explain rationally why she drops the basket she is carrying and runs.

Perhaps, she thinks, she is hoping he will chase her. Perhaps she is hoping he will show some small sense of interest - or perhaps she just cannot bear his scorn, this time around. Perhaps she cannot bear to feel his warmth and then be left in the cold again. That, she thinks, might be closer to the truth. She cannot bear to see him turn away again. Better to do the turning herself - better, that is, until she hears the sound of running footsteps coming after her, and she wonders, just for a moment, if there is not a better way for ghosts to catch those they haunt, or if Thomas’ shade has become as cruel as she fears she has become in his absence, to play with her thus. She ducks through a gate, runs faster, trips, blood pounding in her veins despite her best attempts to keep from feeling - 

And is caught. Arms tighten around her. There is a startled curse, and then -

“Where the hell did you think you were going -”

The hands on her shoulders falter. She stumbles, turning as she falls - 

And the world rights itself, the fog clears away, and she is suddenly at a loss for words, chest tight, mouth suddenly dry, hands trembling - because ghosts do not have physical substance and James has never, never in her memory, looked the way he does right now.

“James?” she blurts, and sees his green eyes widen. He looks poleaxed - utterly, completely shocked, standing as he is in his long, blue overcoat with the breeze stirring around him, proving once and for all that he is no spirit. 

“Miranda,” he breathes. “ _ Miranda -” _

She knows, she thinks suddenly, why she has not seen James’ shade - and knows, too, how Penelope must have felt, damn Homer for glossing over the moment anyway. She lunges toward him, arms outstretched, and she has never, ever been more relieved in all her life - never, than in the moment that James’ arms tighten around her once more and he sobs her name into her hair.

“Miranda,” he repeats, and she says his name too, over and over again, because she cannot quite make herself believe that it is truly him, that they have not truly become other people.

She is not dreaming, she thinks fiercely. She cannot be, for dreams do not smell of the truly terrible oil that James uses on his belts and on his sword, nor do they smell beneath that of the scent she has come to associate with her red-haired husband, or taste of his skin, or -

There have been days when she could hardly move. Days when she could not bear to think, or to imagine, or to be, but today - today, she finds herself breathless for a wholly different reason, crushed as she is to James’ chest. She’s clutching at him, sobbing against the fabric of his coat - cloth, not leather, and God, he looks so different - better, healthier, more alive, somehow, than she has seen him in ten years, and she cannot fathom - cannot understand - does not  _ care _ , at this moment, why that is so, only that it  _ is,  _ that he is here, warm and alive, holding her to him and crying every bit as hard as she. He is here.

“You disappeared,” she starts, hand carding through his hair - shorter, now, no longer covered in salt and blood and sweat. “I tried to write -”

“You died,” he gasps. “I saw it. I saw it happen right in front of me - How?” He places his hands on both of her shoulders and looks her up and down, still shaking, face still pale with emotion - or perhaps it has simply been so long since Miranda saw him when he has not been under the hot Caribbean sun for days on end. She traces a hand over the freckles on his face, and, lost for words, she simply hugs him tight once again. 

They are alive. Somehow, through some miracle, they are both alive, and perhaps - just perhaps, Thomas has now forgiven her, for how else was she to find James here, now, in this place, than by his interference?

“I’m here,” she says. “Is that not enough?” He nods into her shoulder, arms tightening around her, and they remain that way for several moments. They are alive.

James, clearly, has the same thought, and with a gasp, he pulls back.

“I have to tell you -” he starts, and looks around him. “I don’t want to do it here in the street. Have you got anyone accompanying you?” 

She shakes her head. She is well aware that it is customary here, in Philadelphia, for a woman of good breeding to be escorted in public, but she has never felt the need for such and indeed abhors the entire notion. It is one thing Nassau has taught her that she is glad to have learned.

“Good,” James says. He grins at her, suddenly revitalized. “How do you feel about coming with me?” he asks, and she attempts to wrap her mind around the notion that James - her James, the laughing, smiling, confident man she had fallen in love with - seems to be here before her, rather than the haunted shell of that man that she has known for the past ten years. 

“Take me home,” she all but begs, “please.”

He smiles, and Miranda follows him, sparing only one glance over her shoulder. Thomas’ ghost has gone, and yet - 

She can almost smell him on James’ clothing, as once she used.  

*******************************************************

He remembers the first time he and Thomas had entered this house as its new owners.

It is not a large house. It is pleasantly isolated, he thinks, from the other houses in the same general vicinity - enough so that they cannot easily be either heard or seen, which suits them both down to the ground, and yet close enough that it can still be said to be part of Philadelphia proper. It is civilization, of a sort - the kind that Thomas has confessed in whispered words in the dead of night that he has missed dearly. The kind that has libraries, and people, and printing presses. The kind that has coffee houses, and docks, and shops, and a million other sights that Thomas has been deprived of over the past decade and James cannot deny him this - not after what his husband has been through. Not after what they have both been through, and James cannot deny that he, too, has missed parts of it himself, even as he has railed against its institutions. Life in London, after all, had never been entirely abhorrent, and here - 

Well. The Quakers may be many things, but they are not slave holders, or overly concerned with what goes on behind closed doors. 

More than any other memory, he recalls the moment that Thomas had stepped inside, and given an audible gasp. He recalls the moment that his husband had turned to him, a look of sheer, unashamed wonder on his face, and kissed James to within an inch of his life, so taken had he been with this return of some measure of the life he had known prior to his abduction. 

_ “Welcome home,” James had said in a husky voice, and heard Thomas laugh - the same relieved, overwhelmed sound that had welcomed him back to Thomas’ arms months earlier. _

“It’s perfect,” Thomas had said, and James could not deny it. The place  _ is  _ perfect, down to the last detail. It’s small, but cozy - possessed of enough rooms that they may plausibly claim only to room together as two friends might do for convenience, with an extra upstairs chamber that James had gleefully lined with bookcases in anticipation of Thomas’ desire to have a library once again. It stands in the lee of the worst of the wind that comes howling from the northeast on occasion - they even, if they so desire, have an acceptable parlor for entertaining should they wish it. It is perfect in every way - 

Save one. There is no Miranda. There are no delicate teacups she would cherish and drink tea from with a look of pure bliss on her face. There is no harpsichord or spinnet, no waft of her perfume drifting through the house - no Milton left lying on a table or shoes left strewn through the house when she has tired of wearing them against pinched toes. It is a fact they have attempted to cope with as best they may, both of them - Thomas, oddly, more easily than James.

_ “I had thought you both dead for so very long,” Thomas has said softly. “I’ve blamed myself a thousand times for her death, and yours. I’ve thought and prayed and cursed myself for a fool. None of it did any good. I suppose finding that some of it was justified is making the adjustment easier, in its way.” _

_ James had not known what to say to that. He knows of the guilt Thomas still harbors - understands it, and yet -  _

_ “She never blamed you,” he reassures Thomas again. “Never. If she were here -” _

_ Thomas winces, and James goes silent, because that - that is the crux of the problem.  _

_ “She loved you,” he tells Thomas again, and tries to swallow past a lump when Thomas simply reaches out and pulls him close, not daring to speak a word as he strokes his husband’s hair. _

If she were here, James has thought - if only. If only his Miranda could see this place where he has finally, finally recalled what it is to live. If only she could see Thomas here - could see him finding his feet again, and finding himself in the process. If only - 

If only she knew what it is that they have built from the ruin of their past lives, new blooms growing from what James and Thomas had both thought to be long dead stumps.

There is a life to be had, here. He did not believe it at first, had been fully prepared to hate it, but the truth is - 

He has missed cities too, and he can’t bring himself to mind when Thomas teases him over it. It is strange, realizing how many parts of his previous life he has missed, despite his claims to the contrary. And while it is not precisely what Miranda had wanted - it is not Boston - still - 

He has thought so often of what it is they have now, how wrong it seems to have light and music and peace all without her, and he cannot express the joy and the relief that fills him to see Miranda step through the door and stand in the entryway, looking around her in obvious approval and surprise.

“James,” she breathes. “This is -” She turns.

“How?” she asks. “It’s lovely, but it’s so very large.”

“With the money from the cache - the pearls from the Urca -” he starts, and Miranda looks to him. 

“You have a great deal to tell me,” she says, and he swallows hard. 

The air between them feels thick, somehow, and he cannot bear it - not now, not after all this. 

“Can I start with how much I’ve missed you?” he asks, voice shaking, and then - 

His knees, he thinks, are unreliable things. They always have been, and one day, he is undoubtedly simply going to do himself an injury from their treachery, but on this one, he simply sinks down to the ground, and Miranda kneels with him, and holds him close.

“I’ve missed you too,” she reassures. “So very much. I have missed you, my darling.”

“Why didn’t you write?” he asks in a rough tone of voice. “If I had known - if I’d had any idea you were here -”

“I couldn’t,” Miranda answers, and she grasps his hand, and moves it to a spot on her forehead - one he has barely noticed before now, but which tells its story all too well. He exhales, and then draws in a shaking breath, and draws her to him again, face buried in her shoulder, because he knows the scar from a bullet wound when he sees it, and he does not know what Miranda means when she says she could not write - that she was unconscious, or that she’s lost the ability, but either way - 

She’s come so close to death, and cheated it, and in that way she is going to fit right in with them as she always has. He almost laughs at the idea - and at his own strange turn of luck after so many years.

“When the hell did I become so well-favored?” James asks, voice and breath shaking. He pulls back, hands on her arms, gentle even as he grasps hold of her. “Miranda- I’ve something important to tell you, something - I don’t know if you’ll believe me -”

He clings to her, and feels both lost and found again and for a moment he cannot speak, cannot continue, cannot find the words, because she is here, and he is so very, very overcome. 

“I’ve never known you for a liar,” she answers, reaching up to touch his face, and he leans into her touch. “After today I’m not certain there is much I would disbelieve,” she continues with a shaky laugh. “When I tell you how I came to be running full pelt in your direction -”

“Miranda,” he says - 

The door of the house opens and closes again, and the pair of them startle, hands still gripping one another. 

“James - James, are you home? I think we need to talk -”

Miranda gasps at the sound of the voice emanating from the entryway. She turns wide, amazed eyes to James - 

And the door behind them opens. 

***********************************************************************

_ Half an Hour earlier:  _

Thomas has lost sight and trace of her.

He sits down on a well in the alley where he had last seen the flash of her petticoat disappearing, and wonders what he has done that has made him so frightening. 

Christ, has he become so strange that his wife’s shade cannot recognize him? Has he changed so much? James certainly does not seem to think so, but then James is James, and not easily intimidated, or thrown. Unless -

The last time he saw her - had he not ordered her to leave his side, in spirit if not precisely in words? Is her spirit, perhaps, obeying that order even now? Or - or is it worse, far worse? Perhaps - 

God, perhaps, he thinks with a stab of self-loathing, Miranda’s tormented spirit wants nothing to do with him. Perhaps - 

He stops running. He stops everything. He cannot breathe - does not want to inhale, does not want to be Thomas, suddenly, because if his wife is running -

Is it not just possible that she considers him the author of her misery? It does not sound like the Miranda he knew, but then people change, and perhaps - 

Perhaps her ghost is not the Miranda he knew, but a sort of personification of her terror and longing, and why, why is he considering any of this, when she could just as easily be a figment of his own troubled psyche? Why think she is a ghost when -

He is trembling, he realizes - shaking like a leaf in a rainstorm, and it will not do to have yet another breakdown here, in public. He must reach James. He must go home, and hope that his husband has returned, and this time - this time there will be no hiding what his eyes keep showing him, what his mind knows logically is an impossibility but his heart evidently does not. He turns his steps toward home - walks the long, weary mile, through the gate where there is starting to be a hint of green springing up after the long, heavy winter. He leaves his boots by the entry, hand reaching toward the sitting room door.

“James,” he starts. “James - are you home? I think - I think we need to talk.”

His breath stops in his chest as the door swings open, and Thomas feels his mouth go utterly dry all at once. He stares, speechless - and James stands from where he has been knelt on the floor, holding desperately onto a woman. A familiar, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, wearing exactly the same blue dress he had seen her in earlier - one who looks now nothing like Athena - not now that he can see her again, this close to him, although how, he wonders, had Minerva looked to Achilles on the battlefield? How in the quieter moments, her wrath put away and wisdom shining from her eyes? Her eyes are wet and swollen from weeping, and there - just at the edge of her hairline, where her loose hair does not quite cover it- 

There is a small mark on her forehead, almost unnoticeable, and it cannot be, but it is -

“Miranda?”

“Thomas?”

****************************************************************************

She is dreaming. 

There is a man standing in front of her - one who looks so like her lost husband. The features are his. His stance is familiar, his eyes -

She must, she thinks, be dreaming, or dead. It is the only explanation.

“I didn’t know how to say it,” James says from behind her, quietly, and she feels her heart begin to beat wildly in her chest. 

“Thomas?” she repeats, and she can hear her voice trembling. She can see him, standing there, a vision or a conjuration of her lonely mind - except that James seems very convinced he is not, and maybe -

He is standing in front of her, and she cannot move, does not dare. If she moves - if she ruins this illusion - 

“James - tell me I am not hallucinating,” Thomas -  _ Thomas, her Thomas,  _ all but begs, and suddenly she understands. Miranda struggles up to her feet, stumbles forward -

“You’re not,” James assures him, voice rough, and then the spell breaks and they are in each other’s arms, clutching hard enough to bruise - hard enough to prove their presence. Thomas’ hands are on her, his mouth captures hers in a desperate kiss and he is crying - her fearless, indomitable husband is weeping, deep, wracking sobs shaking him to his very core, and suddenly, finally - 

It has been eleven years since she was held in these arms, eleven years she she has felt Thomas’ breath on her skin - and now here she is.

She has come through fire and death, and ice, and snow. She has felt herself go dormant - and dormancy, she now realizes, is all it was. Here, in front of her, is the first true hint of green buds - of rebirth, of the thaw that must follow any long winter, no matter its fierceness. She clutches Thomas, and waits out his sobs, letting her own pass through her like the first rains of spring, and when she pulls back, she can see the same deep relief she feels in his eyes. 

“Are you -”

“What have they done -” 

They both start at once, and stop, and then embrace again. 

“Later,” Thomas says after a moment. “We will have later to discuss - all of that, if we wish. You’re here. Thank God. I thought I’d finally truly lost my mind.”

His voice shakes. He is so strong now - so well-muscled, and she cannot fathom where he has spent the past ten years that he has changed this way, but she takes a moment to simply enjoy being held close in arms that feel as though they could lift her entire weight with little difficulty.

“I thought I had as well,” she agrees. “When I first saw you, I imagined -”

“I’m not a ghost,” Thomas says, and she shakes her head.

“Nor am I. Not anymore.” 

“You were,” James says roughly, and they turn to look at him. “I dreamt about you - so many times.”

“James,” Miranda says after a second. “Please. My love - come and join us.” She reaches out her hand. 

There is a moment's breathless silence. They stand, united again but not fully grown back together and then - James moves forward. He looks, she thinks, as though he might weep - as though he is afraid in some wise that he will throw himself forward only to encounter empty air, as though in giving Miranda back to Thomas they might both disappear. She beckons, reaches out her hand as far as she may - 

James takes it, and together, she and Thomas fold him into their embrace.

“What on Earth have you done to your hair?” she asks after a moment, and James gives a huff of laughter, and all is right with the world again.

“Nothing that can’t be mended,” he answers. “You’ll just have to give it time to grow back.” 

She laughs, and seconds later they begin to do so as well, until with tears in their eyes and joy, they begin the long, slow process of growing back together.

Spring has come.

*******************************************

Epilogue: 

They are none of them ghosts.

They find it out in the simplest of ways - through touch. They cannot get enough of it - they cannot conceive, at this moment in time, of ceasing to touch one another, and so they fumble their way to bed, collapsing upon it in a tangle of limbs, laughing and kissing and finding in each other all the pieces of themselves they had thought abandoned or lost forever.

Thomas’ ribs are still ticklish. Miranda still gasps when one of them runs their fingers under the swell of her buttocks and down the backs of her legs, and James still blushes bright enough to nearly obscure his freckles when they whisper scandalous suggestions in his ears. They are all welcome discoveries, and they make them one by one by one. They discover too their differences. Miranda now needs one of them to steady her when she sits atop their hips. Neither James or Thomas can bear to be held down. All three of them have, independently, made the firm resolution never to hold back from saying “I love you” ever again. They say it now, over and over again, as for the first time in ten years they come together as three people and fall asleep again as one, hands linked and ankles crossed (and Miranda recalls with a smile and a bubble of joyous laughter how very enthusiastic she had been when Thomas touched her ankles with his foot the night before).

She wakes still intertwined with her men, safe and content for the first time in what seems like a lifetime. Miranda cannot recall the last time she had fabric that was so luxurious - or so soft, and she cannot help but revel in it. Everything in her husbands’ bedroom is soft, from the rugs to the bedclothes, and in particular she is fond of Thomas’ new house robe.

“I swore he was never going to wear anything rough ever again,” James tells her, his voice a rumble sounding from across the bed, and she looks to him, not letting go of the man he refers to - their husband, who lies sleeping in her arms again, warm and safe - 

And covered in scars from head to toe, and she would very much like to know why.

“What happened to him?” she asks, and James’ eyes grow stormy once again. 

“It isn’t my story to tell,” he answers, and she frowns. 

“How close were we?” she asks, and he closes his eyes. 

“I could have gone to fetch him home and been back in time for Pastor Lambrick to have finished one of his interminable sermons,” James says, and Miranda feels something in her begin to boil. 

“All those years,” she says. “All that time -”

She runs a hand down Thomas’ scarred back again, and then across the planes of his chest, and holds him closer to her, as if she might protect him across the years and leagues of ocean that have separated them.

“Who?” she asks, and James opens his eyes again.

“Once Thomas wakes,” he says, “we’ll talk. It’s his tale to tell as well as mine, but for now -” He takes a deep breath. “I didn’t come here,” he says, “to this city to sit idly by. Neither did he. It’s only fair you know -”

“You came here,” she says, “because it is one of the largest centers of trade on this coast, and because it is where the Guthries make their home during the winter months. It is where civilization in this place resides. It’s a good choice.” 

“For?” James asks. There is an almost breathless hope in his voice - a yearning in his eyes - 

“It is as good a place as any,” Miranda says, “to begin our campaign. Tell me - had you intended to start by printing pamphlets, or by buying a newspaper outright?”

James looks in her eyes, and then, abruptly, impulsively, he leans across the bed, and captures her lips with his. His hand tangles in her hair, and his breathing is suddenly ragged.

“I love you,” he tells her, voice gone rough with emotion.

“And I you,” she answers. “I am with you. You have me - whatever you intend. We are on the same side.” 

“God, Miranda - you don’t know how long I’ve wanted to hear that,” he breathes, and kisses her again, and she deepens it, glorying in his touch, because the winter has gone, and spring - 

Spring is the time for war. 


End file.
